1. A glass a day keeps the reader at bay
You might cherish holiday memories of floating on a lilo with a beer in one hand and a book in the other, but sadly it doesn't work once the siesta hour is taken away. Devise a system of reading-time units to keep a healthy relationship between the bottle and the page. If you're having trouble with willpower, let F Scott Fitzgerald or Richard Yates set you straight.
2. Switch the TV off
And don't start Breaking Bad series 1 on Netflix, either. If you're addicted to serials, how about going back to Dickens (he's the HBO writers' writer, after all)?
3. Approach the Man Booker prize longlist with caution
Richard House's 1,000-page thriller The Kills or Donal Ryan's slim debut The Spinning Heart? Colm Toibin's novella about Jesus's mother, The Testament of Mary, or Eleanor Catton's massive New Zealand goldrush novel The Luminaries, a good nine times longer? If it's notches on the bedside table you care about, weigh your reading choices with care.
4. Buy an e-reader with an illuminated screen
Then there's no excuse not to have books with you at all times - and nowhere too dark to read them.
5. Cultivate an interest in poetry
Slip a slim volume into your bag and scatter more in all those other, ahem, places you visit regularly during the day. Ten minutes with Seamus Heaney is worth a lifetime with a lesser writer.
6. Rise with the larks...
There's always a spare half-hour between bed and breakfast if you choose to use it. Perfect for short stories - try last year's International Man Booker winner Lydia Davis, if you want real value-per-minute.
7. … and love your insomnia
Those wee hours between three and five am are perfect for reading, be it a gentle Joanna Trollope or something more suitable to long dark nights of the soul (The Anatomy of Melancholy, anyone?). And face it: if you're not reading, you'll only be worrying.
8. Get into audiobooks
They're great for multi-tasking: there's nothing so bracing as walking the dog with your MP3-player turned to 1.5 times the normal speed. Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, with its repeating stories, especially suits this treatment. But be warned: at normal read-aloud rate, audiobooks take far longer than reading yourself.
9. Join a reading group
You'll be so behind the curve that all the lightweights who only joined for wine and nibbles will have gone by now, leaving the serious readers to get on with it. Particularly good for those books you need to be prodded into finishing.
10. Pick up something you can't put down
Cliffhangers are your friends. Whether it's the must-read-one-more-chapter plot reversals of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, or just something that suits your mood, if you're engaged enough, you'll tear through a title.
